MUSLIMS IN AFRICA AND THE CHALLENGES OF THE 21st CENTURY

A Short Presentation at the Conference on Muslims and the
Political Development in Southern Africa, in Johannesburg,
23 to 25 April 1999.

Islam and Africa are inextricably linked. Africa provided the first place of refuge for the first generation of Muslims, fleeing from the intolerance and oppression of the Makkan Arabs. That Islam first crossed to Africa even before going to Madina, is a matter of profound significance, the wisdom of which we are yet to fathom and may unfold in the future. Africa may have well been preserved for a role in the future, indeed it has a great potential for a role in the future. Islam in Africa is, therefore, as old as Islam itself. By the first century of Islam, Islamic communities and polities have emerged and continued to develop, grow and spread in the continent. Where ever it reached in the continent, it spread learning, liberated peoples from the shackles of parochialism and ignorance, boosted trade and commerce, built states of varying complexities and created culture and civilisation. In many parts of Africa literacy started only after the spread of Islam and to this day a great many African languages are written using the Arabic script despite calculated and concerted efforts to  obliterate  it. By introducing literacy, boosting trade, creating centres of learning, Islam triggered unprecedented movements of peoples bringing about social integration at a scale never seen before and yet unmatched by any modern state creation. The Bilad al-Sudan, the stretch of Savannah grassland from Sene-gambia to the Nile valley is a good  case in point. Muslims in Africa, have in the last millenium championed the growth and development of Africa. European  intervention, beginning with the Portuguese in the 15th century and culminating into European colonization in the 18th and 19th century, however, changed all that. Not only did colonization interrupted this gradual development and integration of the continent, it also marked the beginning of a process of subversion and exploitation that has not ceased to this day but has only grown in subtlety and magnitude. Independence, contrary to popular opinion, did not do much to assuage the situation. It did no more than create a false hope, while enduring obstacle continue to be placed on Islam, which alone possesses the potential to liberate the continent once again. Today Africa remains as weak and as emasculated as ever, but worse, Islam, its lasting hope, has also been weakened, Muslims have since been elbowed out of position of influence, their educational system, whence they drive their inspiration, stifled, and rendered politically impotent, even in a democracy, and even where they constitute a majority. The creation of artificial borders by European colonization, the introduction of the territorially based nation state, fashioned along European lines with European type nationalism and the supplanting of Islamic educational system and its replacement with secular and therefore amoral Western type education, have combined to destroy the Muslim sense of community, subvert Muslim solidarity and largely extricate Muslims from the main currents of social, economic and political force. The increasing trend towards globalization, where a global culture symbolized by Macdonald’s and the CNN, only make matters worse, as the drive for cultural suffocation and obliteration is taken to greater altitudes. As we go into the 21st century, the Muslim community, world over, but in Africa in particular, face several challenges, and the way they react to them will largely determine its survival in the first half of the new century. There are many such challenges but for the purpose of this occasion five major areas appear to be particularly relevant. 1.      Sense of Community and Corporate Image The Muslim community is a community of faith. The first community in Madina, despite its relative remoteness, was made up of Africans, Persians, Greeks, Arabs, etc., as if to stress the point, ab initio, that the basis of membership of the community is neither territorial nor racial nor class, but simply faith. This, needless to say, represents a superior criterion and far more advanced basis for human association, than the current vogue, of territory and in the case of Israel, race. This position, it must be added, has anticipated globalization, which renders geographical boundaries obsolete. It may be added that, the current territorial and racial basis of community has been responsible for some of the worst wars the world has seen this century, from the first and second World Wars to the more recent ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo. This Islamic sense of community is what gave the nascent Muslim community in Madina the strength to face and overcome the Arabs of Makka and later the Persian and Roman Byzantine empires. Indeed it is this sense of community which gave Islamic civilization its vigour and strength and made it spread into the heart of Europe in the West and as far the boarders of China in the East. But that Madinan sense of community has all but disappeared among contemporary Muslim community, faith alone does not appear to mean much, we have added all manners of requirements, many of them unofficially, and consequently weakened our solidarity, at a time we are having to face all manners of adversaries. Today the Muslim community, in Africa as elsewhere, needs this Madinan sense of community perhaps more than ever before. In this sense of community we shall discover, not only our strength, but also our position as models and pace setters for humanity. Related to this sense of community is our corporate image as Muslims, which has and continues to take a lot bashing from hostile media. We must not make the mistake of putting all the blame at the doors of Western media, for a good number of times we provide the hostile media not only the opportunity but also the excuse. If the Jews and Christians should send only one representative each to the Truth Commission, in South Africa, but Muslims send four, because they could not agree on one, or if a mosque in Manchester refuses to allow British Muslim women converts in, to pray, should we quarrel with the media if we are portrayed as some bunch of disunited lot who think their little mosques above Kaaba itself, where God himself Has allowed women to go in, circumambulate and even kiss the black stone? 2.      Human Resource Development The Bureaucracy , the academia, the media in a great many African countries today are entirely manned by non-Muslims, even where Muslims constitute majority of the population. While the historical reasons which brought it about, mainly colonial policies, are fairly understandable, the continuity of this skewed manpower distribution is not excusable. Muslims have for the most part been lamenting and appear to have done very little to address this problem. This has meant that in terms of manpower requirement, the Muslim community has had to rely on the non-Muslims. The problem here to be sure,  is not only the absence of Muslim input in government policy, but even in the routine services, Muslim values and sensitivities tend to be ignored, giving vent to the erosion of values and the subversion of Muslim culture.  A non-Muslim police, or nurse or teacher working in a Muslim community can undermine, inadvertently or deliberately, the values of the community. In any case if we do not develop our human resources, they are not likely to be absorbed by the labour market and this will leave idle minds in our community who can not but be devil’s workshop. Even more important, there are certain services that are of strategic significance and that could be quite crucial to the future of the Muslim community. These areas may be the high tech industries on which a lot of our lives are increasingly under their control, it may be some less sophisticated but important areas of the life of the Muslim community. We can no longer leave such issues to chance as we have done all along. We have got to have an idea of our manpower requirements as a community and plan to secure it through training. Our traditional Islamic education also need to be updated to meet our needs, in other words we have to produce the ulama’ of our age. Our standards have over the centuries so fallen that people who are barely literate, with just a smattering of Arabic, able to translate verbatim, some Arabic text, easily qualify as Ulama’. To be learned will require more than just the Arabic language. The advancements in learning and the developments in science and technology which have pervaded every conceivable aspect of human endeavour, has made it necessary for the learned to broaden their horizon and deepen their perception. Even such elementary issues as the validity of water for ablution, will require some familiarity with chemistry considering the increasing pollutants in the atmosphere. Advances in genetic engineering and molecular biology have necessitated the knowledge of school certificate biology to just appreciate the issues, let alone answer a fatwa on the subject. The community must develop the ulama’ of the age or else it will perish intellectually. Our definition of an ‘alim, Muslim scholar, has to be different from what it used to be just a century ago, the needs as well as the challenges are different. As Hassan Turabi would argue, a graduate of chemistry today is an alim if only because the life of the community can not go on with out his input – the purification and safety of the water we drink and perform our ablution. A new generation of ulama’ who are comfortable in both Western and Islamic tradition of learning is absolutely necessary for the community to survive and thrive in the 21st century. The first step in the creation of this generation would be to put an end to the dichotomy between the so called secular schools and the Islamiyya schools. There is no law or logic that stops us from teaching both in one school. If we start today, in 25 years time we would have graduates of medicine who have thoroughly studied the Qur’an and hadith and familiar with current fiqh books. Or a graduate of engineering or journalism who will be given us a tafsir for the month of Ramadan and it is bound to be a better tafsir than what we are getting now. The Muslims community ought to have learned people who could intelligibly discuss with their colleagues the world over and carry us through the 21st century. 3.      Intellectual Development (Civilizational) It was not for nothing that the first word of the Qur’an to come down to mankind was the command to read. Subsequent revelations of the Qur’an, complemented and reinforced by hadith of the Prophet left us in no doubt about the position of Islam on the search and dissemination of knowledge. It was this clarion call which propelled the first generation of Muslims to master the Greek, Persian, Indian and even Chinese sciences and synthesized it in to a new body of knowledge and led the world for at least seven centuries. During this period they created a civilization, the traces of which are still extant, even in Europe. In Africa, the first universities, that of Azhar in Egypt and that of Sankore in Timbuktu, Mali, were established by Muslims and produced great scholars of international refute. For centuries Muslims were producing scholars and making culture in Africa. Of course, we know that today the situation is different, we no longer produce knowledge, we do not produce civilization, we are consumers of other peoples culture and civilization, poor ones at that. What we may not know, or what we may have failed to grasp, are the implications of this tragedy for the future of the community. There are many such implications, but it seems we can have time for only one: we seem to be condemned to only imitate, if grudgingly, the dominating Western civilization, its good as well as its evil. In other words we become victims of Western-centricism and may be unable to develop the intellectual base for our culture and civilization, thus denying ourselves as well as the rest of humanity the befits of Islam. If one may illustrate further, our main stream educational institutions, from their colonial beginnings to date,  have been teaching us all the West thinks we ought to know about western men, his life, history, his economics, his politics, in short his culture and civilization. It doesn’t matter the subject or the course one reads in a university, it is one aspect of western civilization or the other that is only on offer, as if that is all there is in life to be known. From literature to technology, from philosophy to astronomy, even the knowledge of our own medicinal plants, has to wait until it is published in western journals to become knowledge worth imparting. Our idea of education itself, much less our idea of politics and development is patently western. Why, must we spend all our time, energy and  resources studying only the western man, who has never bothered to study us except for some anthropological or exploitative purposes? Has West the monopoly of wisdom? Are we conceding that we have nothing to contribute to humanity? What have we benefited from this subservience all this while? What chance do we have in a world which is increasingly shaped and dominated by the western man? This, I hardly need to add, is not to say that knowledge from the west is necessarily evil, far from it, a lot of it is not only useful, but is even Islamic in essence. The point is the that epistemological basis is largely atheist and the knowledge and culture so produced will continue to undermine rather than strengthen the community. 4.      Economic Development Let me say from the onset, by economic  development I do not mean the reduction of unemployment or some form of  poverty alleviation. We have the capacity to do this through Zakkat, and we shouldn’t blame anyone if we don’t. I have in mind the productive capacity of the Muslims community. The generation of that wealth which alone will protect us from the threats and blackmails of our adversaries. We can not loose sight of the fact that in spite of  the claims of Western governments to support democracy and human rights, they will be the first to place one embargo or the other when ever we announce our intention to implement some aspects of our way of life like the Sharia. We should also have the ability among ourselves, to take good care of our refugees. Ten years ago there were 3.5 million refugees in Africa, who are having to rely on non-Muslim peoples and governments to find shelter and food. We must explore ways to generate the wealth that will enable us meet such needs of the community. Here we have to be looking at ways of organizing some kind of Muslim capital market to encourage investments and small scale industries to maximize the productive capacity of our community. We must appreciate that these resources are absolutely necessary for our survival as a community and that no one is going to do it for us. 5.      Women Development One of the greatest tragedy of the Muslim community today is the way we shut out half of the population of the Ummah. We have left our women resources laying waste for too long. We have stunted the spiritual and material growth of our women and relegated them to the background. We have curtailed their participation in the community, especially in the field of politics. We have in so doing only stunted the growth of our Muslim communities, diminished our potentials and rendered bleak our future. We cannot afford to continue with this misfortune as we go into the competitive world of the 21st century. One is not here suggesting that women should compete with men, as is the case the West, nor is one suggesting that women should abandon their God-given role of raising children. Rather in complementing men Muslim women must be allowed to realize their full human potentials, they must be particularly developed, just as we do with men, to be able to contribute fully to the development of their community. Muslim women must be allowed, just as they were at the time of the prophet, to participate in Jihad, attend mosques, serve to the community in various capacities and above all excel in Islamic scholarship. For as we know too well, Islamic scholarship has never been the monopoly of men, indeed many of the Imams of the schools of fiqh studied at the feet of many a woman scholar. Why have we not produce such women scholars in our age when learning has been made a lot easier? What have we gained by our failure to produce women scholars who give tafsir, comment on hadith and give fatwa on issues that affect our community? How can the Muslim community progress and compete favourably with other communities when half of its human resources are left in ignorance? By Usman Bugaje